‘All is Race.’ An analysis of Disraeli on race,
nation and empire

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which the Victorian Tory politician and novelist
Benjamin Disraeli developed his own racial thinking. In response to the anti-Semitism
of the period he became convinced that race was the key to understand how society
worked. The thesis traces his use of the category of race as a key axis of social
difference and how race intersected in his thinking with class, culture, gender and
nation and empire. It analyses his development of a one-nation-politics discussing his
social criticism and his focus on those who were marginal to the mid-Victorian nation
– working-class men, the Irish and women. The thesis demonstrates how in his attempt
to integrate the Irish into this unified nation he increasingly came to categorise their
militant separatism as the cause of Ireland’s misery. It investigates his conception of
the politics of empire and how it was bound together with his one-nation vision and it
outlines the ways in which his doctrine of race legitimated his imperial interventions.
Drawing on all available sources of Disraeli’s thought, the thesis is a historically
embedded discourse analysis that utilizes methods from political history, social and
cultural history, biographical approaches and cultural studies. It treats novels, letters
and parliamentary speeches as well as other political and social interventions as
differently constituted and situated discourses which need to be understood as distinct
and sometimes contradictory entities which nevertheless form a whole. Inspired by
Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Disraeli as a Jew who fought back this thesis explores
the complex ways in which mid-Victorian discourses of identity and belonging were
interwoven with discourses of race.